I have an invite to the beta for 2 domains. I’m trying to get it working on one of them first. I have provisioned a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 VM on Google cloud compute, and allowed HTTP and HTTPS traffic. I’ve added the domain name to DNS, and checked that it has propogated (it was added about 16 hours ago). The only ‘extra’ packages I have installed are git and apache2 (as yet unconfigured).

Using the command ./letsencrypt-auto auth and completing the dialogue boxes results in

Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
/etc/letsencrypt/live/<my_whitelisted_domain>/fullchain.pem.
Your cert will expire on 2016-02-05. To obtain a new version of the
certificate in the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.

when I add the server parameter (./letsencrypt-auto auth --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory) and answer the dialogue questions with the same responses as before, I get the following result:

The following 'connection' errors were reported by the server:
Domains: <my_whitelisted_domain>
Error: The server could not connect to the client for DV
To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
entered correctly and the DNS A record(s) for that domain
contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that
your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no
firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the
client.

Nothing seems obviously wrong at first glance. I do notice one thing: it looks like you have edited out your domain to replace it with <my_whitelisted_domain>. I just want to make sure you know that on successful issuance, your certificate, including your domain name, will be publicly available in the Certificate Transparency logs. If you’re willing to include the actual domain name here, it might be easier for people to help diagnose, e.g. by looking at the Certificate Transparency logs or double-checking that your domain actually resolves.

I appreciate that, but was hoping to get a chance to make sure the relevant security was in place first - as I have left it ‘raw’ as per my inital post to make sure nothing was impeding on the certificate process!